Dominion by Randy Alcorn Read Free Book Online Page A

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The pastor’s wife led the choir in “Amazing Grace.” They sang that song most Sundays in the black churches Clarence had been part of. The three white churches he’d been to out in Gresham sang it once in a while too, but never like this. In white churches you sang it quickly, crisply, without much emotion, and you always knew when the song was over. Here it was long and drawn out, half dirge and half joyous rapture, as if it had a life of its own. Black folk never sang it twice the same way, never knew when the song leader would stop until he did. Often it would last three times longer than in a white church.
Clarence didn’t sing. He didn’t want to sing.
“When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’d first begun.”
I won’t sing your praises for letting Dani die.
Clarence heard the sobbing all around him, the shaking, the low mournful wailing. It was a black funeral all right. He felt his father’s hand on him. The old man’s immense deep-set eyes watered, changing slightly their deep brown color, making them shine like polished rocks. The eyes held more tears than they should have been able to.
“Dani loved that ol’ song,” he whispered to Clarence. “Written by the old slave-ship captain, you know. God got hold of that boy, he did. Yessuh, Dani loved it wid all her heart. She there now, Son. Singin’ God’s praises. Wid yo’ mama.”
Those great eyes could no longer contain the water, which spilled down on the front of his old brown polyester church suit, purchased in the seventies.
Clarence put his right arm around his papa and his left hand on the patriarch’s left hand. It felt something like it did when he touched it as a boy, callused and leathery from years of toiling at every form of work coloreds ever did in the South, from picking cotton to milling grain to shoeing horses to scrubbing floors. Except then it was so strong. Now it was so weak.
“A man shouldn’t have to see his baby die,” Obadiah whispered.
“I know, Papa. I know.”
“Lord Almighty,” Obadiah continued to whisper, “he know the pain of his child dyin’ though. He had a reason for Jesus dyin’. Powerful reason. And he gots a reason for this too. I knows he does.”
Daddy, stop looking for the best in the worst. It’s not to be found.
Clarence remembered sitting out on their Puckett, Mississippi, porch as an eight-year-old, his father looking up at the sky and talking on and on about the man in the moon. “Yessuh, I see you’s smilin’ again tonight, ol’ friend. What you got up yo’ sleeve? What you know we don’t? Look like you’s ready to burst, ol’ man.” He’d laugh and laugh.
Young Clarence would ask him to point out all these happy features on the moon’s face. But no matter how much his daddy pointed, all he could see was the craggy, lifeless desolation, a scarred and beaten surface on a tedious repetitive journey across the sky. It bothered him then and it bothered him now that his father saw with such different eyes than he.
“I gonna miss her, Son. Gonna miss my Dani terrible. Already do. Already do.”
The congregation sang two songs about crossing Jordan. They sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, Comin’ fo’ to Carry Me Home.” These songs blended pain and joy in the strangest ways, as if written by those who knew one because they had seen so much of the other, as if the hope they expressed somehow meant much more because of the suffering that preceded it.
Clarence mouthed the songs as a lapsed practitioner of a faith mouths its creeds, more out of habit than conviction. His lips moved, but no sound came out. It wasn’t so much that he disbelieved as that he resented what he believed.
I’m tired of injustice. I’m tired of evil winning. If you’re God, why don’t you just stop it?
A worship team came up front and sang a song he’d never heard. “Knowing you Jesus, knowing you; there is no